Women still have to jump through hoops and over hurdles simply to get some career satisfaction and the possibility of advancement. But for many women the decision about whether and when to have a child is the most difficult one they face. What should be a natural and joyful right can become a minefield.
There is still a mismatch between how powerful people say they feel about the value of mothers and motherhood and how this is experienced by the women themselves. In answer to former President of Harvard and Secretary to the Treasury Laurence Summers’s grandiose statement, ‘Raising children … is the most important job in the world … The differences between men and women are innate’, academic Ann Crittenden1 retorts: ‘Raising children may be the most important job in the world, but you can’t put it on your résumé’ when you are searching for employment.
Towards the end of our interview with Brenda Hale, we asked her how far she felt we had come in the battle for equality. “The problem is systemic,” she replied, “The baby question will always be there. It won’t just go away” – words that will ring true for almost every working woman.
Liz McMeikan feels that “childbirth causes a career crisis for women. In her opinion private sector company career structures tend to be “rigid and unforgiving and some women’s careers never recover momentum”.
Helen Wells, who was Director of Opportunity Now, agrees. “For most women who are on the way up childcare responsibilities represent a huge problem.” Emma Howard Boyd goes further, saying, “At present many women feel that they must either not have children or behave as if they have none.”
Perhaps the biggest failure in western society is to have developed systems of work and power structures that do not take adequate account of the need for women to have babies and bring up their children.
The decision whether or not to have children is never taken lightly. For working women, with some idea of their future career prospects, it is a choice often made with an incomplete knowledge of potentially major implications.
Most of the women we interviewed do have children. Of those choosing not to, some said quite openly that their achievements would not have been possible if they had been mothers.
Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers and herself the mother of two daughters cautioned: “For some women being ‘childfree’ is a genuine decision but for others it is a ‘constrained’ choice and that is terrible.”
Many women in jobs with a clear career trajectory decide to have children in their late thirties or early forties, making sure that they are firmly on the promotion ladder before risking maternity leave. Although this has advantages from a career perspective, delaying having children till later may affect fertility, so even this decision can be fraught with difficulties.
In answers to a questionnaire2 sent by Opportunity Now to 3,800 senior women managers and followed up by interviews, nearly three-quarters of the respondents agreed that commitment to the family is a barrier to women’s achievement and that advancement depends on putting career before family.
It was Joan Williams who coined the phrase ‘the maternal wall’ in 2001. In a later article published3 in 2004 and written with co-authors Faye Crosby and Monica Biernat she gives ample evidence that motherhood carries particular penalties. In 2004 mothers in the US earned only 60 per cent of the average pay for fathers. They suggest that this differential in pay is caused by the fact that jobs are still defined in terms of the way men live their lives. Continuous unbroken employment is assumed to be the norm.
A number of the women we interviewed expressed the fear of being ‘forgotten’ by their employers and the consequent pressure to return to work, often too early. We heard numerous instances of women not taking (or not being offered) sufficient maternity leave – one scientist working right through until the day her baby was born and returning within a few weeks.
Jill May, who was Director of Strategy at UBS Bank, never took more than 12 weeks maternity leave because she was worried about the effects of a long absence. She said explicitly that, “I thought I should get back quickly or I might be forgotten.” Three months was the norm in the 1980s, she feels. A series of three-month maternity leaves also worked for Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Executive Director of Tesco. “This length of absence did not damage my career as longer breaks would have done.” Helena Morrissey told us that “I went back too early because I was afraid of the outcomes if I didn’t.”
Anna Dugdale, CEO of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, even stayed on for an important meeting after her waters had broken. She then returned two days after the birth of her baby, “for an hour or two”. She said in explanation, “I was in the right place for treatment if anything went wrong.”
Julie Towers, now Managing Director of Recruitment Services at Penna, used to work for a local authority. Feeling under some pressure, she returned to work two and half weeks after the birth of her first child but feels strongly that in this respect she was a bad role model. “Women should take sensible periods of maternity leave and should also insist on returning to work at the same level, not accepting downgrading.” Her own experience was discouraging. When she told her boss in the local Council that she was pregnant he said, ‘Come back when you are better (sic) and we will try to fit you in …’.
Another senior woman told us that when she returned to work after having children, she noticed a distinct difference in the way she was treated. A senior manager said to her, ‘I am surprised that you are here – I thought you were having a baby.’ Similarly, when BBC Trustee Suzanna Taverne took maternity leave from her job in newspaper publishing she was told, ‘We will try to find something for you if you come back.’ In the event she was forced to take legal action against the company and achieved a satisfactory outcome, but, “it was a very uncomfortable 12 months”.
In 1995 when Sue Vinnicombe and Nina Colwill4 wrote the book, The Essence of Women in Management, they recorded not only that throughout Europe women managers were much more likely than men to be single or childless but also that the UK had the poorest statutory maternity provision in Europe.
One interviewee took maternity leave from a merchant bank, where she held a senior position, in the early days of the development of maternity leave policies. She was offered three months’ maternity leave. She kept in touch with clients and business development but avoided direct contact. Nevertheless, three days after the birth of her second child she was asked to join a telephone conference call when no other senior colleague was available.
We were told of a more recent experience which was particularly unpleasant. When one woman took up the matter of her bonus payment being cut back while she was on maternity leave (an illegal reduction) her employer answered, ‘I have a bunch of men who are working their arses off while you are sitting at home.’
Things have improved in the last 15 years but not by as much as we might have expected. The period of maternity leave has increased to a maximum of 52 weeks but this improvement is undermined by the fact that statutory maternity pay is so low. Indeed, according to a study conducted in 2014 by Mercer Human Resource Consulting,5 maternity pay in the UK is the third lowest in the European Union: only Greece and Luxembourg have lower rates. The best payments are in the Scandinavian countries where women received between two and three times as much in statutory pay compared with women in Britain. Gary Bowker, employment law expert at Mercer, commented on the results of their study. “With the Government’s emphasis on family-friendly policies, it’s surprising that UK statutory benefits are so much lower than in the rest of the EU.”
The attitude of employers remains a problem. A study by Nelarine Cornelius and Denise Skinner6 in 2008 compared the careers of senior men and women. Two-thirds of the women interviewed reported that their employer’s negative attitude to maternity leave was a barrier for them.
Looking after a child from babyhood is physically and emotionally satisfying. The experience of watching developments, however minute, is precious and needs to be cherished. However, being at home as the only adult with young children all day can have its downside. A surprising number of the women we interviewed mentioned the boredom of staying at home to look after very young children. “Looking after young children was boring. I had to work,” said Stella Paes, Head of Science at AQA. “I had to work for my sanity,” agrees senior former hospital manager, Deirdre Mackinlay and environmental lawyer Pamela Castle told us that she needed to do something worthwhile and “to keep my brain working”. One civil servant says that she spent six years at home with her children before “boredom eventually drove me back to work”.
Matt Gaw,7 now a stay-at-home father, wrote recently, ‘I was amazed at the brain-mushing drudgery of large parts of the day … I was always exhausted, often irritable and sick of Fireman Sam.’
The difficulty of returning after a break was mentioned by several women. There seems to be little help in easing back, and few employers make much effort to keep women on maternity leave informed about what is going on in the workplace or about changes that may be taking place.
For some women, having spent four or five years at home raising their families, the thought of returning to work can be daunting. They have developed confidence in their role as a mother and this has become their identity. They no longer see themselves as the person they were before the birth of their child. Venturing back into the alien world of work can be terrifying. Will they be taken seriously? Have they lost the necessary skills? Many of us are familiar with that feeling that being with a young child or children all day has led to a diminished vocabulary and even concentrating on uninterrupted adult conversations may be hard to sustain at first.
These feelings are not exclusive to women, Hannah Rosin8 in her book The End of Men describes Andy, the stay-at-home carpenter who is wistful about his old job. However, when his wife suggests that he might go back to work, he is terrified. ‘It’s been a long time and he’s lost the stomach for it,’ she says.
Having returned to work, what the vast majority of women say they need is flexibility. Lesley Wilkin, Managing Director of Hay Consulting Group (UK and Ireland), has expanded and formalised a scheme for keeping women consultants on contract as associates while they take maternity leave. She insists that this system is of great advantage to Hay: “We don’t lose their experience,” as well as bringing advantages to the mothers. “Very few mothers want a complete break from work,” she says, “They just need greater flexibility.”
When she returned to work after the birth of her first child, Liz McMeikan, was advised by a senior manager that she should copy the methods of another woman in the company who behaved as if her children did not exist. She says that the advice was given in all seriousness.
Small things can make a big difference. When asked by her boss what help she would need now she had a child, Helena Morrissey made a wonderfully simple request. She asked for and was given one of three allocated car parking spaces in the company car park so she could drive to the office after dropping her child off at nursery.
Kate Grussing is the founder of Sapphire Partners, the executive search consultancy with strong expertise in helping companies recruit senior women. She told us that, in her opinion, “Women who take a year off for maternity leave risk stalling their careers and losing momentum, although it feels politically incorrect to advocate maternity leave of three to six months in length.” She went on to say that women should not have unrealistic expectations about finding a new job after a career break. “Unfortunately, most head hunters won’t touch mothers with young children.”
This somewhat brutal-sounding judgement was softened when she shared with us the advice she gives to women who want to return to work. The main message is that women need to be proactive in keeping abreast of developments. They also need to keep in touch with former colleagues, keep their CV up to date, regularly remind their company of their existence and know what the going market rate is for their work. Clearly, this is sensible advice, but it accepts that most companies are under little pressure to adapt or change their practices. It is still the women who have to fit in.
In 2013, Research company One–Poll9 questioned 1,000 women about what happened when they returned to work. Almost a third of the new mothers felt they did not fit in anymore and two in five felt they lacked support. Almost 20 per cent felt that no one understood what it was like to be juggling work with new motherhood.
As Ivana Bartoletti, Chair of Fabian Women’s network, says, “There still has to be a shift in culture at the workplace.”
Parents in the twenty-first century appear to share childcare much more equitably but the main burden still seems to rest with the mother. Let us not misunderstand: most women, and indeed many of the women we spoke to, are not altogether unhappy about this situation. As Jan Royall, Labour Leader in the House of Lords says, “Women like being mothers.” Fiona Millar10 in The Secret World of the Working Mother vividly describes what she calls ‘the pull’ to be with your child. For many women this strong attachment is visceral. MP Julie Elliott agrees. “I really enjoyed being at home with my four children.”
Liz McMeikan took six weeks maternity leave and assumed that when she returned to work she would simply take over where she had left off. In fact the physical and psychological need to look after her baby took her completely by surprise. On her first day back she had to attend a conference and could not concentrate. Her brain was somewhere else. “I was gibbering,” she says.
In her book, Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood, Melissa Benn11 describes her own conflicts:
As the new mother of a young child and as a self-employed writer, I had been back at work, if fitfully, within weeks of the birth, resentfully taking transatlantic calls at some unearthly hour of the night on an article that needed more work on it. This was at a time when all I wanted to do was gaze at my new baby girl and not worry about money or the outside world, or whether I was still considered a serious person.
Some mothers, whilst railing against their partner’s apparent blindness to the daily routines and chores that need to be done if the household is to run smoothly, nevertheless admit the need “to control their families and find it hard to relinquish that power,” says Deirdre Mackinlay. Publisher, Ulli Drewett, feels that some women have a constant struggle not to be in charge at home. Watching her husband with their three children, she has to bite her tongue not to say, “I want it done my way.” When Jan Royall went to work for the EU in Brussels, her husband took on the caring role for their three children which he enjoyed and managed very well. “But,” she admits, “I still wanted to be the mother – with all the responsibilities. I found it difficult to take a back seat.”
Sheryl Sandberg,12 Facebook’s COO, in her book: Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, describes this as ‘maternal gatekeeping’. ‘I have seen so many women inadvertently discourage their husbands from doing their share by being too controlling or critical,’ she writes. Hannah Rosin13 says that, in the course of many interviews, ‘I did not talk to a single breadwinner wife who has entirely ceded the domestic space.’ Suzanne Warner concurs, “I have never met a woman who was not the default carer for her children.”
Even where the husband or male partner stays at home to look after the children, the working mother still often finds herself doing the routine household chores at home. Ruth Bushyager is “very grateful” to her husband for looking after their children while working part time himself but says she does “the cooking, cleaning and laundry”.
Perhaps what Veronica Jarvis Tichenor14 calls the ‘selfless devotion of motherhood … tied up with issues of love and identity’ needs to be analysed and confronted by all of us. Changes in culture are difficult to achieve. Every day women receive messages from family, the media and adverts that they are primarily responsible for looking after the home. Gloria Steinem15 says that men should take equal responsibility. ‘The idea of having it all never meant doing it all. Men are parents too and actually women will never be equal outside the home until men are equal inside the home.’ But these matters are complicated. When women complain that their partners do not take equal responsibility in the home it may be that in some cases their own attitudes, ingrained since birth, are not encouraging their partners to do so. The best compromise seems to be for men to accept that women want to retain responsibility but also need more help and support than they get at present. This conclusion has important implications for future policy and we explore them in Chapter 11.
Childcare remains a difficult issue in Britain. The choices are few and not always satisfactory. Reliability, distance from home and the cost are all factors that have to be taken into consideration. For women working long hours and perhaps travelling too, having a partner at home seems to be the most popular option. Childminders, nannies, au pairs and nurseries and, more common these days, grandparents, all take on childcare. For most families one, or a combination, of these arrangements generally works well, although the cry of a woman quoted in Breaking the Barriers,16 ‘I only see my little boy for half an hour a day during the week,’ pulls at the heartstrings.
Understanding women’s need to work, Patricia Hollis, now in the House of Lords and formerly Leader of Norwich City Council, advises young women to “spend your entire earnings on childcare if necessary …”
In a speech to the 2013 Labour Party conference, Ed Miliband promised to keep schools open from eight in the morning until six in the evening to help parents with childcare. On the surface this sounds like a good scheme but, as experienced childminder Beatriz Lees points out, this may help businesses and parents but it does not answer the needs of the child. “Remaining at school for ten hours is a very long day for a child in an environment designed for formal learning, not as a place able to cater for a child’s individual needs.”
For some women employing nannies is the best solution because this allows greater flexibility and the child feels secure with one known adult. But this can be an expensive option. One interviewee says she is now a senior manager and earning enough to employ a full-time nanny and is even able to build her children’s events into her 24-hour diary. However, she acknowledges that for most women this luxury is very unusual and that even women who eventually get to the top normally have their children when they have much less money and even less control.
“The choice for most working women with children is between using a succession of nannies which leads to misery and guilt or to make it explicit that you want to reduce your workload and accept the consequences of that at work,” said one woman rather despondently.
A rarely mentioned drawback to employing nannies and au pairs is that the children can become extremely attached to them. Compounding the guilt felt by many women at leaving their child to go to work is the scenario they paint of finding that their child, when upset, runs to the other woman. A working mother might feel relief that the child is obviously secure in the care of the other woman but there must also be a natural resentment that the affection, that she thought was reserved for her, has somehow been forfeited. Journalist Gaby Hinsliffe describes17 ‘the fierce feeling of possessiveness, a rather shameful sense that someone else had something that was mine. Even now, at the end of a working day, there is a small primal shock when my son hurls himself at me smelling faintly of his childminder’s perfume’. Irrational and momentary, perhaps, but painful nevertheless.
Anna Dugdale wanted stability for her children and that meant hiring nannies who would stay for long periods. On the other hand she realised that long-serving nannies meant that the nanny would be special to the children and this might diminish her own importance in their eyes. So she thought out what was important to her and managed her working day to make sure that she could be home every evening to spend time with her children and put them to bed.
These are very complex issues. Deirdre Anderson et al.18 in their research paper Women partners leaving the firm: Choice, what choice? quotes one woman who had examined the options for childcare and decided, ‘I didn’t want … to outsource (sic) my family and get a live-in nanny.’
Tensions arise when women need to leave work in time to see their children. Even when their working hours have been agreed, it can be hard for women to leave in the middle of a meeting, sometimes leaving unfinished business. Jan Royall described how she used to feel guilty leaving her office in the House of Commons to be with her children, even when she had already worked after her agreed finishing time. Often an urgent matter had arisen and that is a common event in politics. “But people seemed to be in the habit of working late and there was a definite ‘jackets on chairs’ syndrome.” Pamela Castle admits to “mixed feelings” when a young woman made it clear that she had to leave a vital meeting at six o’clock in order to get home before her nanny left at seven. Reflecting on the incident, she accepted that the woman had every right to leave when she did and wondered whether the work needed to be organised so that it went on into the night. However, whatever the rights and wrongs, it meant that Pamela Castle was left without crucial support.
The good news is that research tells us that children and families benefit from working mothers. Contrary to generally accepted beliefs, mothers who work are said to spend more time reading and talking to their children than their own non-working mothers used to do.
In Through the Labyrinth: The Truth about How Women become Leaders, which many consider a seminal book on women and leadership, Alice Eagly and Linda Carli19 found that ‘employed mothers in the USA in 2000 spent as much time interacting with their children as nonworking mothers did in 1975, even though phone calls and emails now intrude upon personal lives’. Intriguingly the authors go on to say, ‘Mothers these days are often critical of their parenting skills – especially educated mothers.’ Perhaps childminder Beatriz Lees understands why. She meets some mothers who are very confident in their work outside the home and are used to running tight and demanding schedules, “but babies and little children have their own agenda,” she says.
Some working mothers, like Liz Nelson, want to make the time spent with their children very special. When her three children were young she had a full-time nanny. “I was not there 24 hours a day but I genuinely believe in quality time.” These children benefit from concentrated periods of time with their mothers talking and playing with them, ignoring any potential interruptions.
The enhanced wellbeing of working mothers and of their families is now also well documented. Unfortunately these facts will not prevent many mothers who work being engulfed by feelings of guilt. Indeed very often children suffer less from the anxiety of separation than do their mothers.
On the other hand, working at home may not always be the solution. Patricia Hollis told us that when she was a university lecturer,
I used to do all my university research, writing and marking at home, with a nanny/childminder looking after my children so that I could work while still being at home. Until my three-year-old son came into the study demanding my typewriter. Assuming he wanted to thump on it, I suggested we find a xylophone. Oh no, it was the typewriter he wanted. Why? Well, he wanted to take it into the garden and bury it. Then I would play with him. Ouch! Whatever you do, you can’t get it right all or even most of the time. You just have to be good enough, not perfect.
Mercer’s survey of maternity pay throughout Europe showed that situation for new parents in Finland and Sweden is to be envied. Parental leave in Finland is 281 days on full salary. In Sweden parents are allowed 15 months leave on 90 per cent of their average earnings and fathers are obliged to take three months paternal leave. An important point is the inclusion of men in the equation.
As we were ending our conversation Patricia Hollis said,
We have one battle left: part-time work for men who choose it. We need to change the culture of middle management for men, so that they are not considered wimps if they choose to work part time. This is about how couples manage children and are guilt free.
In Men Can Do It, Gideon Burrows20 is adamant that more men could share care equally with their partners if they were more determined to do so. He admits that traditional views about men and women’s roles can act as a deterrent and, as a full-time non-working parent of young children, he recounts how women at the playgroup sit at the opposite side of the room to avoid him and ignore him at the school gate, making him feel isolated. However he firmly believes that men should quash feelings of discomfort and be braver about approaching these groups of unwelcoming women. Gradually they will come to accept the fact that men also need to join in the conversations and break down barriers. He is impatient with the excuse of alienation. ‘Since when has a little social embarrassment stopped men from doing exactly what we want?’
At parties in Brussels, where Jan Royall was working for the European Commission, her husband Stewart found that people would ask him what he did for a living and when he said he looked after the children “they would look down and walk on”. She found that very hurtful to witness. He felt he had no real identity and this situation occasionally caused tensions between them.
Rebecca Gill is the Policy officer of The Young Women’s Trust. When her husband asked his employer, which happened to be a trade union, if he could work part time in order to help with childcare, he was met with resistance and finally with a refusal. An experience he found deeply upsetting, although he admitted that this was a situation women frequently encounter.
More sharing of childcare does seem to be the best answer. Research carried out by Rosalind Barnett and Karen Gareis21 appears to demonstrate that the quality of life for mothers who work improved. ‘They suffer less depression and have a greater sense of wellbeing if they work …’ The researchers also conclude that, ‘Men’s lives are improved by taking on more of the family responsibilities.’
The arrival of a second child in the family seems to alter matters considerably. Most people concur that arrangements for two children are far more complicated than managing satisfactory childcare for just one. Apart from the time factor, children have individual and differing needs and some women who coped at work with the first child admitted to having difficulties with two, occasionally even taking the decision, sometimes with great reluctance, to stop working for a while.
Lesley Wilkin’s associate contract scheme for women on maternity leave has already been mentioned and she says that she has seen the enormous pressure on women who try to handle a demanding job after the second child.
Because Helena Kennedy QC was working in a freelance capacity when her children were young and, being under pressure, she took only four months leave with her first child, gradually taking more time off as she became more confident after the births of her subsequent two children. She made the vital point, too often underestimated, that it is not just young children who need their mothers. Many children also need their mother very badly when they get to their teens, facing the problems of puberty and taking exams. During her second daughter’s A Level years, Deborah Hargreaves managed to arrange her work to spend time with her. She spoke of her relief at having time to chat to her. “Up until now there had only been time to talk schedules and issue instructions.”
Research has come to the same conclusions. Deirdre Anderson22 and her colleagues quote a woman whom they interviewed as part of their research. She said, ‘I wanted to be more involved in their teenage years than their toddler years.’ This need should be more widely recognised. Fiona Miller23 quotes writer Kate Figes who ‘believes society hasn’t yet worked out that it needs to allow parents extra leeway to cope with adolescents in the way we forgive the need to deal with smaller children’.
In The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued, academic Ann Crittenden24 reflects that, ‘Economically, motherhood is the worst decision a woman can make.’ A devastating comment, corroborated more recently by Sheryl Sandberg25 who quotes some alarming statistics from the USA: only 74 per cent of women rejoin the workforce and only 40 per cent return full time. Their household income drops accordingly. In the UK, mothers’ earnings decrease by roughly 13 per cent per child.26
An unbroken career is still the expected norm. Even in a working life currently likely to last over 40 years in total, the notion of a woman taking four or five years away from paid employment is not something that most companies will contemplate. It is as if employers expect a mother’s brain to atrophy in that short time and that women will not be able to retain any skill or competences from their previous years in employment.
It has to be acknowledged that for a small company, paying for maternity leave can be a serious financial burden. Despite strong feelings of solidarity with female colleagues, Pamela Castle reluctantly recognised that just putting up the costs of employing women of childbearing age without making other changes might simply mean that employers are even more reluctant to take them on.
Liz Nelson, a champion of women at work who opened our conversation by stating unequivocally, “I’m in favour of quotas,” said equally firmly, “If I were an employer now and a woman took 12 months off after having a baby expecting to come back on the same salary, I would refuse.” And making such actions illegal has not solved the problem. We search for a better solution in Chapter 11.
Part-time work is still stigmatised. In No Seat at the Table, Douglas Branson27 reports on the ‘isolation, loss of status … loss of desirable assignments, elimination of advancement opportunities … and relegation to (what he calls) sub-par office space’.
Edward Craft is a solicitor and a corporate governance specialist. He has two young daughters and spoke passionately about the need for it to be made much easier for women to return to work. He cannot understand why companies refuse to introduce flexible working. “The morale of employees improves, turnover is reduced and people working part time usually work longer than their contracted hours.” He has managed to persuade his (female) boss of the value of flexibility in the workplace. “The whole organisation benefits from work of better quality from more satisfied people.”
At present his enlightened views are unusual. Part-time work is still undervalued, even though study after study has proved that contented part-timers work much harder than tired and worried full-timers. When children are ill, parents (usually mothers) are sometimes too worried to admit that they are taking days off to look after them, pretending that they are sick themselves or they even risk sending their sick children to school. In these circumstances, as Margaret Littlewood, former lecturer in Gender Studies at the Open University put it, “Children can become invisible for working women.”
Despite often being accused of lacking serious commitment, most women who work part time do far more than the ‘official’ hours they are paid for. It is more acceptable now to work three or four days a week, particularly since the use of computers has facilitated working at home for part of the time.
For many women working part time brings great advantages: they are part of the working world, making contact with people on a professional level whilst still enjoying time with their children at home.
But there are dangers. Teresa Graham told us that employers expect a full-time commitment from senior managers so “senior women on part-time contracts often find themselves covering full-time hours but only being paid two-thirds of a full-time salary”.
Publisher Ulli Drewett describes what can happen if the hours worked are not strictly adhered to: “I felt I wasn’t doing anything properly. I was making sacrifices but there was no quality family life. Even though it was officially four days a week I was virtually full time.”
The fierce outburst by renowned astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell28 during a radio interview with Jim Al Kalili reminds us that fortunately things have moved on somewhat: ‘They just don’t understand about the grit needed just to be there. To hold my own. When I returned to work with a young family, colleagues thought I was not serious because I worked part time. People don’t realise how difficult it was to work in Britain at all when you were a mother in the 60s.’
Discussing the long hours culture demanded by many organisations, which can deter women from having children, Kay Carberry, Assistant General Secretary of the TUC, told us, “… many choices are made under constraint. They are not choices at all.”
University lecturer in psychology, Ellie Dommett, is unequivocal: because of the long hours that have to be put in in the lab and also the important discussions that take place during early mornings or late evenings. “In science as a woman you either have a career or you have children.” A powerful statement, challenged by some women scientists, but the long hours that have to be spent in the lab and where some of the experiments may be harmful for pregnant women are undoubted deterrents.
Surgeon Jane Butters told us about “the horrendous hours that new surgeons have to work. They also have to contend with irregularity. The early starts can be managed but there is no guarantee of finishing times in surgery. You are dealing with live patients and you can’t just leave them because your shift has officially ended. This makes childcare a nightmare and definitely contributes to the lack of women in this field”.
Sympathising with the plight of women with children who nevertheless feel entitled to a decent career, she added, “Why have children you never see?” Certainly a few of the women we interviewed spoke with some sadness of the missed opportunities of actively participating in their children’s lives while they themselves were pursuing high-level careers.
Even barrister Cherie Booth29 in a recent passionately argued article writes, ‘… I didn’t take any real maternity leave with my three younger children, It is only looking back that I realise I wasn’t beating the system but reinforcing it.’
We need more employers to adopt General Colin Powell’s rejection of what he calls ‘busy bastards’ who put in long hours at the office without realising the impact they have on their staff.
Job sharing can be an ideal solution for those who are able to organise it. Former Financial Times journalist, now Director of the High Pay Centre, Deborah Hargreaves, eventually managed to persuade her reluctant Editor that sharing an overlapping three-day week with another colleague would work. They were asked to specialise in agriculture where it might be thought they would be less visible, but in fact they secured their job-share just as the BSE crisis story broke and farming was on the front page most days! Their system worked successfully for over two years until they both decided to move to other positions.
Efficient job sharing in any industry requires a close relationship between the job-sharers, very careful briefing of each other on hand over and regular briefing of one’s boss.
With determination and a genuine recognition on the part of employers of the value of making conditions flexible, it is also possible to create a working environment which is both efficient and comfortable for all concerned.
Kay Carberry the first woman to serve on the TUC’s senior management team, spoke with gratitude of the efforts of the then General Secretary, Norman Willis, to make it possible for her to attend meetings by rearranging the weekly timetable so that she was able to take her son to nursery first. As Kay Carberry says, “It was difficult to charge to the nursery to drop and pick up my son. There are certain things which are totally non-negotiable when you have children.” Part-time work and flexible hours are on offer to all staff working for the TUC, whether or not they have children. In addition, half of childcare costs are paid by the TUC, rising to three-quarters for single parents. The TUC finds that such working conditions benefit the organisation as well as the workforce.
Maura McGowan, Chair of the Bar Council, is proud that there is now a central nursery for the children of all staff – barristers and administrators, male and female. Furthermore, she says, “This was definitely pushed through by both sexes.”
For civil servant Melanie Dawes, the enlightened support from her male boss was “very encouraging and came at just the right time”. When she was six months pregnant he told her that he wanted her to continue in her job after the birth and that she could return on any hours and pattern of days. He also gave her the very good advice to make no decision until well after the baby was born.
Andrew Mackenzie, Chief Executive of BHP Billiton, told us of his company’s approach to supporting women at work: “Women who leave to have children are encouraged to return to work by providing flexible work arrangements on return. In addition our Accelerated Leadership Development programme is weighted towards high potential women to support our efforts to improve gender balance among our leadership population.”
District Judge Susanna Jones wonders how many professions genuinely need completely unbroken service nowadays. How long does it really take for anyone to catch up on recent developments and the latest technology?
In a digital age when so much can be achieved with no face to face contact, women are frequently offered the opportunity to work from home. This sounds straightforward, but using technology in this way is only a temporary or partial solution to helping women back to work. In the end they complain about isolation. Part of every person’s satisfaction at work is the opportunity to meet and interact with colleagues. In her research, Rosalind Gill30 of the LSE found that, ‘In spite of the image of workers enjoying the freedom to work at home, very few wanted to do so because they all valued the opportunity to work close to others doing similar work.’ She concludes that working from home is often by necessity not by choice. And of course there is also the added concern that, with no one responsible for overseeing the number of hours worked at home, there is the obvious danger of workers being exploited.
Several dilemmas have been discussed in this chapter to which there are no easy solutions. Women want to spend time at home after the birth of their child. Generally this is an intensely enjoyable and fulfilling period in their lives but most women want more than a long period at home. There must be the opportunity to return to work and continue a career. When their male partners are happy to play a bigger role in the upbringing many women find it hard to ‘let go’ and allow the men to take over. For most families with one or two children, the early stage of parenthood only lasts a short time, although when things are not running smoothly it can seem endless. The system in Sweden, with both parents obliged to take paid leave on virtually full pay for several months, would appear to be a positive step, with beneficial results for parents and children.
Another set of problems arise when women return to work. In Britain they often find that employers think they are less committed to their job, especially if they ask to work flexibly. And as further pressures develop in the teenage years or at other pressure points, the penalty that women pay for being mothers appears to increase.
Some younger couples in Britain seem to have settled on a more equal system of sharing childcare and this leads us to hope that a new generation of men and women will find more satisfactory answers to the contradictory tensions. But simply hoping for things to change cannot be an adequate response to problems that are blighting the lives of so many women. We need to look at how other countries have made better progress than Britain. New and properly enforced laws must play a part but it is difficult to see how these complex dilemmas can be resolved just through legislation. Other initiatives are required to prompt the cultural changes that are needed.
‘You can’t do it all,’ says Gloria Steinem.31 ‘No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals a day and be multi-orgasmic … superwoman is the adversary of the women’s movement.’ In short, the pressures on women in the modern world are too great.
That is the ultimate condemnation of our system.
It is two centuries since the industrial revolution but the world of work has still not found a way to reconcile the demands of employment with the fact that women have babies. At the moment mothers are, in effect, excluded from much employment and from many positions of power. So women are still forced to choose between a high-flying career and children. That is appalling.
Jane Fuller, owner and Director of Fuller Analysis Consultancy, said, “It helped me not to have children in my career. I could be more flexible and work longer hours if necessary but you shouldn’t have jobs that mothers can’t do.”
That is one of the challenges that we address in Chapters 11 and 12.